| [Nov. 19th, 2011|06:40 am] |
Kakashi wasn’t the only one who’d been hurting.
“I want you,” he said, quick and fierce, before Ryouma could doubt it. “With strings, no running. And I’ll want whatever you want to be, but there is nothing wrong with you.” He pulled back, wrapping his fingers around Ryouma’s jaw. “And I’m about ready to bite the next person who says otherwise, including you.”
Ryouma chuckled hoarsely. “I wouldn’t, just now. I probably taste nasty.”
At some point, Kakashi thought, he was going to tie Ryouma down and gag him just to make it through a conversation without detours.
“I mean it,” he said, and took a breath. Tried to give Ryouma words that make sense. “I wasn’t fair to you at the Stone — I wasn’t fair before the Stone, and I was wrong. I’ve always thought if you were good enough, if you tried hard enough, if you did it right, then you could finish the mission and keep your teammates alive. If you loved the Village enough, you’d never break.”
They had stopped walking, now. Ryouma’s breath plumed in the night air. Light from a late-closing shop cut golden bars across his face, making his eyes dark and his cheekbones cut-glass sharp. His arm was warm around Kakashi’s shoulders.
“But everybody breaks, one way or another,” Kakashi said. “Or else they die before they can.”
Under rockslides, saving friends; swallowed by Death Gods, saving lives; by their own hand, for no damn reason at all.
There was a chakra signature behind them, up high on a roof. A faint flicker that vanished when Kakashi spiked a warning shiver through his own chakra. The tail end of Arakaki’s watch, or just a passing shinobi; he couldn’t tell.
He drew another breath and forced out the thought that had eaten at him since the Hokage’s office. Since Ryouma had vanished, and no one had said anything, and Kakashi’s hold on loyalty had splintered in both hands.
“I think the village is broken.”
And I don’t know what to do. |
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